Speculative Realism and Science Fiction

Imagines the end of anthropocentrism through contemporary science fiction and speculative realism

A human-centred approach to the environment is leading to ecological collapse. One of the ways that speculative realism challenges anthropomorphism is by taking non-human things to be as valid objects of investivation as humans, allowing a more responsible and truthful view of the world to take place. Brian Willems uses a range of science fiction literature that questions anthropomorphism both to develop and challenge this philosophical position. He looks at how nonsense and sense exist together in science fiction, the way in which language is not a guarantee of personhood, the role of vision in relation to identity formation, the difference between metamorphosis and modulation, representations of non-human deaths and the function of plasticity within the Anthropocene.

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Willems considers the works of Cormac McCarthy, Paolo Bacigalupi, Neil Gaiman, China Miéville, Doris Lessing and Kim Stanley Robinson are considered alongside some of the main figures of speculative materialism including Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux and Jane Bennett.

About the Author

Brian Willems is Assistant Professor of literature and film at the University of Split, Croatia. He is the author of Hopkins and Heidegger (Continuum, 2009), Facticity, Poverty and Clones: On Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (Atropos Press, 2010) and Shooting the Moon (Zero Books, 2015). He is co-editor of The First Ten Years of English Studies in Split (Split University, 2011).

Reviews

Speculative Realism and Science Fiction is an exhilarating intellectual adventure. Moving deftly between philosophical and science-fictional modes of speculation, Brian Willems uncovers a landscape of beauty and strangeness, in which we find ourselves lost, and yet touched and moved by the unknown.

- Steven Shaviro, DeRoy Professor of English, Wayne State University

"Brian Willems’s recent monograph serves as a much-needed addition to studies of both sf and the evolving strand of philosophical thought known as speculative realism."